Various embodiments relate generally to network switch systems, methods, devices and computer programs and, more specifically, relate to network switch systems using partially validated trees which are specified for groups of flows.
This section is intended to provide a background or context. The description may include concepts that may be pursued, but have not necessarily been previously conceived or pursued. Unless indicated otherwise, what is described in this section is not deemed prior art to the description and claims and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
University, government, business, and financial service entities, among others, have increasingly relied upon data center networks. As such, data center networks are generally expanding in terms of the number of servers incorporated therein, as well as the networking equipment needed to interconnect the servers for accommodating the data transfer requirements of the applications that the servers are called upon to implement.
These conventional data center networks have several drawbacks. For example, data communications between servers that are not co-located within the same rack may experience excessive delay (also referred to herein as “latency”) within the data center network, due in no small part to the multitude of switches and/or routers that the data may be required to traverse as it propagates up, down, and/or across the hierarchical architecture of the network. Further, because multiple paths may be employed to deliver broadcast and/or multicast data to different destinations within the data center network, such broadcast and/or multicast data may experience excessive latency skew. Such latency and/or latency skew may be exacerbated as the size of the data center network and/or its load increases. The hierarchical architecture of the data center network also generally suffers from increasingly complex fiber cabling requirements as the numbers of switches, routers, layers, and their interconnections are increased to handle the expansion of the data center network.
As these data center networks grow in size, the routing between nodes also becomes more complicated. Each node in the data center network may be provided with a forwarding tree instructing the node how to handle traffic which flows through it. However, as the size of the tree grows, the number of potential failures on the tree also grows. This can lead to problems where a problem in one link may invalidate the entire tree for every node it touches. This can create additional work for the nodes as they are forced to adopt new trees which, from the perspective of the node, may be identical to the prior tree.
It would therefore be desirable to have data center network architectures, systems, and methods that avoid at least some of the drawbacks of the data center networks described above.